Posts Tagged 'Our Tax £s'

UPDATED BELOW: An interesting story has been submitted by a reader, concerning a controversial planned wind farm development in Yorkshire that could call into question the position one of UKIP’s highest profile MEPs who is also a candidate in next year’s General Election.

The name of UKIP’s William Dartmouth MEP appears as an owner or tenant of land on a planning application that was submitted to Kirklees Council last year, to build three 100m wind turbines on unspoilt countryside next to Cupwith Reservior (location shown above) near Huddersfield, where the scheme applicant, Valley Wind Co-operative, is receiving funding for the project from the EU’s European Regional Development Fund.

What makes this matter curious is that William Dartmouth’s office has denied that he is directly or indirectly linked to the application site.

All of the the information about the proposed windfarm development was sent to Nigel Farage, and a member of Farage’s staff eventually responded stating that Dartmouth’s office had replied claiming he wasn’t linked directly or indirectly. This is curious given this screenshot of the land ownership section of the planning application:

What also appears to put a question mark against Dartmouth’s denial, while giving the accuracy of the information above further weight, is a story from 2012 that demonstrates land ownership and three-way linkage between Dartmouth, Carter Jonas and Rosscroft Ltd (whose name appears at the top of the screenshot). The story concerned a planning application to drain Cupwith Reservior. The applicant was Rosscroft Ltd, the agent was Carter Jonas LLP, and the owner of the reservoir is the Dartmouth Estate of one Earl of Dartmouth (aka William Dartmouth) – an assertion reported by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner when reporting that Dartmouth’s appeal against the rejection of the application had also been lost. There is no evidence the media have been asked to correct their assertion.

As if further evidence is required that where there is Rosscroft / Carter Jonas there seems to be Dartmouth, there is an entirely unrelated planning matter, where William Dartmouth was the named applicant for planning permission, with his chosen agent was Carter Jonas LLP. The links are clear.

Given all this information, it seems that UKIP has accepted Dartmouth’s denial without checking the facts for themselves, calling into question yet again the party’s internal processes for dealing with complaints or reports of conflict of interest among its elected officials.

UPDATE: We have been sent a copy of a letter that was sent to Nigel Farage personally, just after one of the recent debates with Nick Clegg, from an opponent of the wind farm. It includes the following paragraph which suggests that William Legge (Legge being the family name of the Earl of Dartmouth) stands to gain in the region of £60,000 per annum if three wind turbines are erected on his land…

So I was delighted on your stance against wind turbines but have to point out the total hypocrisy of your MEP William Legge who is touting his land out for a wind farm as one of the above applications. This land is protected moorland and 300 meters away from a National Trust Bird sanctuary. It is estimated he will receive £20k ground rent per 100m turbine (there are 3 currently planned) – i.e. £60k per year. This is in total opposition to UKIP’s manifesto. I cannot see how he can be a UKIP MEP and at the same time pursue this course of action in his private life.

It is worth noting that David Cameron’s father-in-law, Sir Reginald Sheffield is often referred to as an example of a land owning rent seeker, trousering an reported £350,000 a year for turbines on his land. Is the only difference between the Sheffields and the Dartmouths a mere matter of scale?

In addition to wanting the UK to leave the EU, UKIP has a policy against onshore wind turbines. So, having one of its senior MEPs set to benefit financially from money given in grants by the EU, for the installation on his land of three giant turbines – that the party’s policy formally opposes – would be a serious conflict of interest and a likely resigning matter. Further, that UKIP does not seem to have diligently investigated the reports sent to them by concerned residents in the area of the planned windfarm that one of their senior MEPs had this conflict of interest, seems to be another failure of internal process. UKIP has questions to answer about that.

But for now, William Dartmouth has questions to answer.

Why is it that he appears to have been untruthful about his interest in the land where the turbines are planned?

As a clearly stated owner or tenant of the land, as shown on the official planning applications, what does he stand to gain if the application is approved and Valley Wind Co-operative build the turbines?

I think we should be told.

UKIP have been contacted and asked if they wish to respond to this story.

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The latest nauseating case of that curious species, the Westminster troughing hog, has seen Maria Miller ordered to repay we taxpayers £5,800 she wrongly claimed.

The story had me primed to write a post demanding that taxpayers must get back the other £38,000 that the Standards Commissioner said Miller should repay. But then yesterday the Chair of the Standards Committee of MPs, which voted to ensure Miller got to keep the rest of the money, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards who originally said Miller should repay £44,000, issued a joint statement which had the effect of circling the wagons.

But while that was circulating and pouring copious amounts of mud into already murky waters, the former editor of the Telegraph, Tony Gallagher, was telling the BBC that one of Miller’s special advisers had leaned on the journalist writing the story of her claiming money she was not entitled to, effectively threatening that Miller had the ability to exact legislative retribution for the Telegraph running the story.

At the time I thought, if there is anything in this claim – and the wording did seem very specific – the journalist would surely have the comments on tape. Having given Miller’s aide sufficient time and space to deny the story, the Telegraph has now released a recording showing that Miller’s SpAd did exactly what she was accused of.

In the same way I refuse to believe someone in the UKIP press office made up and issued a policy reversal on gay marriage without it being sanctioned, I refuse to believe Maria Miller’s SpAd acted without Miller’s knowledge or authority. While Miller might have just about unjustly survived paying back a tiny amount of overclaimed money from our hard earned cash, and for giving an ungracious 32-second apology that was the equivalent of flicking two fingers to MPs (the public of course get no apology, despite being the party offended against), the actions of her adviser should have her clearing her desk by Monday.

No Cabinet Minister has ever made such an apology in the Commons and clung to their job. She should have resigned this week. But now we can add what amounts to blackmail in an effort to silence a media that is already shockingly poor, she should be sacked. No ifs, buts or maybes. This abuse of office cannot be allowed to stand.

But of course, this is the state of our ‘democracy’ today. The decisions will be made by MPs and men in grey suits. The voters who have been offended against and who should have the ability to have Miller removed from office for what has happened, can only look on. In this case it’s just as well the media decided to take an interest, otherwise Miller’s wrongdoing and the corruption in her office would not have come to light.

Just imagine how many more falsehoods, truths and corruptions could be exposed if the media chose to take notice and report them…

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PC Mike Baillon, 42, quit his job after becoming the butt of jokes from fellow officers over a YouTube video of him battering the Range Rover of a 74-year-old driver. The video of PC Baillon wielding his truncheon became a YouTube sensation – with the tribunal being told it has been viewed online thousands of times. The tribunal heard PC Baillon walked out of his job after being ridiculed every day by his colleagues at the police station where he worked, reports the Daily Mail.

So, lets get this straight. Because he got the hump about the (richly deserved) ribbing he got from other coppers for his extreme, thuggish and violent behaviour – he didn’t even attempt to ask the driver to open the door and then take the key – he walks out of the job, sues the police, and the poor bloody taxpayer picks up a bill for £430,000. Poor bloody lamb. This seems to be a case of small man syndrome by a petulant little pillock who looks like the stroppy type who would attract ridicule like turds attract flies and who probably only joined the force because it enabled him to throw his weight around. They say this prat would have made Sergeant. I would have pitied any copper who had this buffoon for a skipper.

Despite the worst efforts of some officers, there are still some decent old style thief takers in the UK’s police forces that deserve our respect. Some of them experience real traumas in the course of their duties, but still get on with the job rather than take the easy option of leaving with a big payoff. Even those that can’t cope after intensely stressful and emotional incidents that can be truly horrific at least leave for understandable reasons. But being mocked by colleagues because of their own ridiculously over the top actions isn’t one of them. No doubt his reaction to the mockery fuelled its continuation.

I for one am sick and bloody tired of people like this self absorbed idiot abusing public money to fund a lifestyle change, or to simply cash in because they see an opportunity to do so. Apologies for the language, but sometimes….

And in other news…

The 6-year-old boy who was suspended from school because his parents refused to fill his lunch box with tofu, lettuce, carrot sticks and wheaten bread as per the school’s dictatorial ‘healthy eating’ policy, preferring to give him a sausage roll, or scotch egg and mini cheddars or other snack type foods, has now been expelled from his school – and his younger brother’s funded sessions at the school’s pre school have been withdrawn. The school said:

If we are faced with a situation where a parent threatens to send a pupil into school with insufficient food to sustain them throughout the school day, it is a risk we simply cannot afford to happen.

This is the usual demonising, twisted doublespeak we have come to expect from the control freaks who are determined to take control of the upbringing of our children. The issue was not insufficient food, rather the parents did not conform to the kind of food the school decided should be provided.

The school had said that it was extremely disappointing that the media have been provided with such grossly misleading information which has resulted in them running a wholly inaccurate and potentially damaging story for the school, yet its subsequent comments do not correct any of the original assertions, instead they reinforce them – particularly when the statement adds:

…during the course of a recent four day exclusion, the pupil’s parents made it publicly clear that their child would not be following the school’s policy on healthy eating upon their return.

Welcome to the glorious fruits of the quiet, slowburn cultural marxist revolution in action.

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It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify worthy and genuine charities, those that prioiritise the delivery of good works for people in genuine need by channelling every penny possible to them.

In the first instance, if a charity relies on state handouts for the bulk of its funding then it isn’t a charity at all, but an extension of the state. It also suggests the charity does not appeal to donors sufficiently to make them want to part with their money. Prompting this is a column by Amanda Platell, which reminds us of the corruption of the definition of the word ‘poverty’ by groups such as the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), to suit their own ends. As their website explains:

What this adopted ‘definition’ shows is that in affluent societies where real poverty does exists but is comparatively rare, the only way a charity like the CPAG can justify its existance is through a corruption of the definition and creation of a problem that isn’t really there. In that way it can enjoin the state to fork over our money to tackle – if one can describe their work in such terms – ‘relative poverty’.

You may wonder what’s in it for CPAG. A look at their website makes that very obvious…

What this menu of options tells us is that CPAG is a business. It has people on the payroll focused on publications, media, education and lobbying. It is an enterprise that generates income (pg 5) for a staff whose primary focus is merely:

Such awareness consists of adverts and videos like the one below which, while purporting to tell us the truth about benefits Britain, singularly fails to recognise or mention that governments use benefits as electoral bribes and have a vested interest in making people dependent on the state; increase the cost of living through rising taxation; wheezes like fighting ‘climate change'; subsidising wealthy companies and land owner involved in renewables; sending aid money overseas; financing the EU’s largesse and so on.

There is much talk but little direct intervention on show. I’m sure the ‘poverty’ stricken will be glad of this ‘help’, especially when the first £1,362,314 of the ‘charity’s’ income in the last financial year (pg 20) was spent on salaries, National Insurance and pension contributions, more than £70,ooo of which was spent on the chief executive, Alison Garnham. At least she has enough money for a selective diet, activity participation and customary amenities:

To keep this show on the road, the Child Poverty Action Group needs to keep the cash coming in. To keep the cash coming in it needs to keep inventing crises, peddling myths and constructing a narrative to give the impression there is a major and immediate problem that has to be addressed, requiring substantial public funds that have the happy coincidence of meeting the employment costs of like minded activists. In this it is no different to so many other of these fake charities.

People are being taken for fools. The current multi-pronged campaign being waged by self serving ‘poverty’ activists on everything from wages to food banks to deprived children, is a scam. These committed political activists are applying pressure and being joined in their cause by simple minded virtue-mongers who need the supposed issues to be true to justify their chest beating and scattergun condemnation of everyone and everything they believe to be less virtuous than them.

As these entities are reliant on state funding rather than individual donations, the only way to stop feeding the beast is to show up these campaign chartities for what they are – so even the government will not want to be seen by taxpayers as being associated with them. It’s time for the rip off to end.

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There are few sights as heartwarming as seeing the BBC writhing around in orgasmic ecstasty, but that is what we have been able to enjoy today.

We can only feel pleased for the corporation, for no less than 120 Beeboids were shipped to South Africa to cover the Nelson Mandela memorial service for TV, radio and web. And rightly so, because no opportunity to visit far flung corners of the world for a well deserved jaunt on full expenses and with no luxuries spared should ever be passed up. It has been earned. And in return our intrepid and fearless expeditionary force rewarded us with an impossibly large range of news angles to tell us in many, many different ways that Mandela was special.

Not only were our BBC truth seekers able to get moist while listening to a conveyor belt of eulogies to one of their biggest heroes, who transformed the world single handedly without any hint of a stain or blemish on his character, they were also treated to what may be the final curtain call for BBC favourite Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and were privileged to have been in the presence of a Cuban Castro – names which have featured so prominently in impartial and balanced BBC coverage for decades.

But best of all for Team Auntie, they have experienced the thrill of seeing, live and in the flesh, their hero of the modern era, President Barack Obama. The World’s President stood like a giant, holding forth in full effect, working that teleprompter like no one else can, before taking a few selfies with a Danish blonde and an Old Etonian with narcissistic tendencies and a delusion disorder. Truly he is great.

In fact, such was the BBC delerium at seeing Obama it was hard to tell from the news reports whether the most significant event just outside Johannesburg was Madiba’s memorial or Obama’s tribute to his hero. Naturally it was a fine line to tread, but one the Beeboids did with poise and without the slightest hint of sycophancy.

What is especially pleasing is that in recent days the BBC has achieved all this by making liberal use of license fee money and managing to triage the news in order to sift out trivial domestic events, such as the worst storm surge in the last 60 years that has flooded hundreds of families out of their homes and businesses. Make no mistake, this is a triumph.

The BBC identified what was important to them and their worldview, then put their backs into ensuring we all shared in the experience. They did this safe in the knowledge that any small minded person who lacks the education and intellectual depth required be able to respect the BBC way as the right way and who deigns to complain about this, will be brushed off in the usual manner; and that thanks to the entirely proper and not at all hypocritical Freedom of Information exemption enjoyed by the corporation, have done all this safe in the knowledge the editorial decision making process will remain secret and beyond accountability. As it should be, naturally.

When Christopher Booker isn’t ploughing a lonely furrow exposing the disturbing secret behaviour of the courts as they put children into care or take them to be put up for adoption; he is making the weather on the wind turbines – and specifically this week reminding us of how the weather reduces their already poor performance to even more rotten levels.

Yet even though the facts Booker has presented are accepted by DECC – meaning their projections for wind power generation are being significantly overstated – DECC is continuing to use their incorrect and inflated numbers to justify the proliferation of wind turbines at vast expense to taxpayers, in return for even less energy than the fraction of capacity they already deliver.

If a political party cannot fund itself through membership fees or donations then it should wither and die.

That is one of the more sensible comments that left in response to a typically sycophantic outburst from Steve Richards in the Guardian.

People have the freedom to join political parties or not, to donate money to them or not. However it seems that if we use that freedom to reject the parties and withhold our money from them, the establishment will remove our freedom by compelling – through a law to which we will not be asked to give assent – the confiscation of our money for their own private, party political use. They will attempt to justify this in much the same way Richards tries with this appeal:

We need parties. The alternative is nightmarish […]

[…] Virtually every dark story in British politics over the last 30 years has a connection with the funding of politics, but without funding parties cannot function.

In other words, they want us to believe there is no alternative to the parties bar anarchy; and all the examples of dirty dealing and misbehaviour by the parties to hoover up cash have only happened because of our unreasonable refusal to voluntarily hand over our money to subsidise their vested, tribal interests. It is only the because the parties have made themselves irrelevant, by treating the electorate as if we are irrelevant that they find themselves in this position. And now they are going to compound the problem.

The softening up process of preparing the way for theft on an industrial scale – not for purpose of providing essential services, but for nothing more than the maintenance of parties with agendas that run contrary to the wishes of most people – is well underway. Richards’ piece is just the latest call from within the establishment for state funding of parties. Its inception would represent a staggering abuse of power.

Do you think such an obscene state of affairs could ever come about in a democracy? It must be opposed aggressively.

Longrider has a post on this subject saying much the same thing, in his own inimitable way…

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The latest incidence of the EU throwing yet more public money to the BBC, to fund its proselytising mission on behalf of the Brussels machine, has sparked a reaction that suggests many people are not aware of the long standing and cosy relationship between the biased broadcaster and the bureaucracy.

The Telegraph reports on the £4.5 million handout given to BBC Media Action so it would train (indoctrinate) journalists in countries neighbouring the EU about the bloc, as part of the EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy, which aims ‘to create an area of shared values, stability and prosperity, enhanced cooperation and deeper economic and regional integration’. In other words, EU enlargement.

Nowhere in the article is there any mention of the fact the BBC received nearly £3million in grant money from the European Union between 2008-2012, in addition to grants of over £16 million from supposedly cash strapped local authorities across the UK (front line spending, eh?) to fund ‘research and development’ projects, despite the Telegraph itself running that story in February last year.

Returning to this latest commission payment,bribe, payment, this also has the happy coincidence of enabling the pro-EU Common Purpose termites within the BBC to spread their Marxist, anti democratic tentacles and encourage shadow structures to develop, where CP graduates work to their own shared agenda, regardless of the public’s agenda.

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The news over the weekend and this morning confirms the UK is in the throes of a self inflicted nuclear power disaster. The fall out has the capacity to be catastrophic for energy consumers.

This concerns the deal, mentioned in passing in our last posting, that sees the French and Chinese consortia behind the financing and construction of HInkley Point C in Somerset, guaranteed a minimum price for the energy generated that is nearly double what we pay for nuclear power today.

The comment I intended to make at this point is eclipsed by Richard’s observations, which more eloquently articulate what I intended to say:

What is very far from clear, though, are the exact reasons why nuclear has increased in price so much. Nevertheless, in what is clearly a rigged market, the most likely culprit is the regulatory ratchet.

Increasing the time taken to approve schemes, and adding to design and construction costs, regulation is reckoned to be enough to have caused the massive price hike. And much of the regulation will have been promoted by Green activists, the aim being to price nuclear power out of business.

According to this seminal book, the process has been going on a long time. Now, it would appear, the activism has achieved its effect. We have a nuclear disaster – but not one that the Greens had predicted.

As fuel costs rise fuel poverty will kill vastly more than nuclear power is ever likely to. That is the real disaster, made all the worse by the fact that it is largely the result of deliberate ploys to increase the price of nuclear generated electricity.

We have recently seen similar efforts across the European Union by green activists to make the potential of shale gas to provide a secure, domestic source of energy, unaffordable through regulatory cost.

This is not about safety. This is not about efficiency. It is certainly not about providing sufficient energy to meet the growing demand of a rising population. It is solely about forcing countries to adopt what the activists perceive as ‘green’ and ‘clean’ energy because the alternatives would have been made uneconomic due to politics alone.

These green groups are pursuing their own narrow, dogmatic and flawed agenda, but have been appointed by the EU as the ‘voice of the citizens’. Without our consent or input these groups have been installed as our ‘representatives’ to government – but are following an agenda that we have never been asked to consider, let alone endorse.

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The Agenda 21-originating strategy for its notion of the ‘sustainable’ use of energy is now out in plain view. We can see this in the Telegraph today with the headline above.

The story, by the Beano’s fearless dynamic duo Steve Hawkes and Jessica Winch, actually offers readers some value in its opening paragraphs:

Britain’s biggest energy supplier blamed Government costs as it pushed the average annual dual fuel bills up by £120 a year to almost £1,470 – the highest typical tariff ever seen in the UK.

Ian Peters, head of residential energy, said British Gas understood energy bills were a “real worry” but there was little the company could do.

But he faces a fierce backlash after telling customers a price rise didn’t necessarily mean they would have to pay more. He said: “The amount you pay depends not on the price, but on how much gas and electricity you use.”

And this is exactly what we were highlighting the other day in our post about energy. I explained my personal situation where my only option to avoid paying more for my energy is to use less. I explained that is exactly what the government’s energy policy is designed to achieve, to force everyone to use less by driving up the prices. And now British Gas is explicitly telling customers to use less energy.

With that in mind, the sheer contempt and cold hatred I feel for the Axis of Weasel, warming their fat, taxpayer funded arses on the green benches on all sides of the House of Commons, should be understandable.

Instead of pursuing a strategy to devise effective, efficient, affordable and low impact energy generation and distribution systems, to comfortably meet the demand from a growing and, thanks to human progress, an increasingly energy-intensive population in these Isles, the entire political class has glued itself to an environmentalist driven agenda to reverse progress and force us to use less energy.

The moronic hypocrites in the Labour party naturally seek to make political capital of this latest price rise, declaring it was yet another example of why Ed Miliband’s price freeze was needed – as if they bear no responsibility for these measures being enacted when Miliband was the Secretary of State who pushed them through. Thus we see the putrid Caroline Flint declaring that:

Britain’s energy market isn’t working for ordinary families and businesses.

Yet she and her colleagues are the ones to blame for this, and the execution of the strategy that ensures the market doesn’t work and prices are being forced up by government delusion over cutting CO2 emissions. But the Tories and Lib Dems bear equal responsibility. Which is why, when the likes of Michael Fallon spout shite about the energy sector needing more competition and that people can save money if they shop around; and Ed Davey demanding energy companies justify the price increases brought about by the very policies he is actively pursuing and seeking to make even more burdonsome, as the current Minister at DECC, I am left in a simmering rage at the whole shoddy, incompetent, deceitful, sick inducing lot of them.

Getting back to today’s news, Chris Weston, British Gas managing director, is quoted as saying the cost of green subsidies and environmental programmes such as ‘Eco’ – free loft and cavity wall insulation – were to blame for almost half of the increase. Yet for most properties the amount saved off energy bills from reduced use would take many years to cover the cost of the measures government has forced energy companies to offer. And there are many properties where the design does not allow for such measures, meaning they are stuck with higher bills in return for nothing.

Did you vote for this? Did you want this? I’ll wager the answer is no. Yet, as a citizen of the EU (whether you want to be or not) you have supposedly been represented in the discussion and decision making that has resulted in our energy prices being driven up. No, really.

But for that to be true, in the UK, unless you would need to be a paid up, consulted and voting member of:

The Wildlife Trusts

The Woodland Trust

Waste Watch

Scottish Environment Link

Friends of the Earth

Environmental Protection UK

Client Earth

Compassion in World Farming

Wildlife and Countryside Link

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

Green Alliance

FERN – EU Forest Programme

Campaign to Protect Rural England

For it is only these organisations that ‘represent’ UK citizens in the discussion that informs such energy policies. This is because, under the guise of listening to what ‘citizens’ have to say, these are the campaign groups the EU chooses to recognise as part of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB).

Public funding from the EU and national governments flows to these groups to lobby back at them and sit alongside ministers and national representatives as equals. This gives the ability to the senior leaders of these groups to dictate the approach to environment and energy that impacts all of us, and it is they who have driven and are driving many of the decisions that result in the increases in energy costs that are punishing the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

But ask the members of these organisations how many of them were asked to vote on this approach to energy, or approve their organisation’s position, and I will warrant the vast majority had no say and probably could not articulate the political stance their membership is validating. But there we are. Realpolitik in action. Democracy as interpreted by governments. And we poor bastards continue to foot the bill – some of us dying for the lack of affordable energy to stay warm in past and coming winters.

The political class needs to be stopped.

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Barely a day goes by without the media (particularly the BBC with its desire to air Labour’s current favourite topics) focusing attention on something we are all very acutely aware of, namely energy prices.

In recent days we have had Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) lead off the regular cycle of price rise announcements with an 8.2% hike on gas and electricity bills. The political response was all too predictable. Labour – the party which, with Ed Miliband as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, wilfully took ‘green’ measures in the 2008 Climate Change Act it knew and admitted would drive prices upwards and increase the cost of living – described the rise as scandalous.

As an example of rank hypocrisy, this is head and shoulders beyond anything we’ve seen in a long time.

Meanwhile the Tories maintained their mind-numbingly stupid refrain that the energy sector needs more competition and that people can save money if they shop around. This is patent bollocks. I have used every available price comparison website and I’ve checked for every available deal based on the energy my household uses. I am on a tariff that expires in 2014, but which is cheaper than any tariff or fixed deal currently available on the market from any energy provider.

When my current deal expires I will have to pay more for my energy. All I can do is limit the increase to the smallest amount possible, which will be well over an additional £100 per year. And my provider is yet to increase prices this winter, so the amount will be even more.

My only option to avoid paying more for my energy is to use less. And that is exactly what the government’s energy policy is designed to achieve, to force everyone to use less by driving up the prices. This goes to the heart of the sustainability mantra. This is based in the enviro-belief that humans are a plague on the planet and must use fewer resources. They resent the idea of technology being used to provide abundant energy that is affordable for most people. They want people to have a difficult existence. Richard explained this on EU Referendum this week when he wrote:

Never properly explained, though, is that the price increases are the result of deliberate government polity, using the price mechanism to reduce demand and thereby enable successive governments to meet self-imposed targets for “decarbonisation”.

Where the politicians have been caught out is in listening to Green propaganda, offering the fools’ paradise of increased energy efficiency, though more efficient appliances and insulation, without realising that low-income families are quite unable to offset increased costs in this manner, making fuel poverty the problem of our times – and again one which was entirely predictable.

What was interesting to note last week was SSE echoing what is becoming an industry-wide mantra that government ‘green’ levies are responsible for a substantial proportion of the price increases people have been and will continue to experience and struggle with. They have made clear that while wholesale energy costs have gone up by about 4% in the past year, the cost of government-imposed levies on energy bills has increased by three times as much – 13%, and will continue to rise due to the cost of connecting useless wind farms to the energy grid, where they can provide a fraction of their potential and far less than the equivalent of nuclear or conventional installed capacity.

Today, Christopher Booker reminds us of more mind numbing Tory stupidity from the fool Michael Fallon:

While SSE called for a curb on these green levies – such as the crazy “carbon tax”, designed eventually to double the cost of electricity from fossil fuels, which still supply 70 per cent of our needs – the only official response was a fatuous call from our energy minister, Michael Fallon, for consumers to boycott SSE. Mr Fallon was oblivious to the fact that his Government’s policies will soon force all other energy companies to follow suit.

Just as the government and the media twist themselves into contortions to hide the fact the Royal Mail privatisation has only happened because the EU said it must, the government and the media are twisting themselves into contortions to attack the power companies and conceal from the public the fact that rising energy bills are largely due to government policy; which is taking our money to pour into unjustified subsidies for wind turbines and lavish payments for wealthy landowners to have them on their land. And all this despite the evident inefficiencies and failings of turbines as a source of energy generation.

People can be forgiven for being sick and tired of energy price rises, but they need to be aware of where the upward price pressures are coming from – and the majority of it is from the hypocritical, deceitful and delusional morons that infest the corridors of Whitehall, taking their orders from Little Europe, which has taken its orders from the global power brokers most of us have never heard of.

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Make no mistake, the cuts to the legal aid budget will have ramifications for the ability of less well off people to have access to justice. The media, in particular the BBC, will continue to tease out individual cases as part of its activism to make the case against cutting legal aid.

But the fact remains that legal aid has been abused by many people who easily have sufficient means to fund legal counsel, and by a number of solicitors and barristers, some of whom have become extremely wealthy over the years as a result. Legal aid has also been used by convicted criminals to make unwarranted, nuisance challenges to punishments and restrictions justly handed down to them.

So it is of no surprise to hear yet more bleating from vested interests about how they are being adversely affected by the cuts after years of living happy on the hog, milking the legal aid fund to maintain very comfortable lifestyles indeed at our expense.

The most prominent example of this has surfaced in the Telegraph today, as Michael Mansfield QC’s firm, Tooks Chambers, has announced it is to cease taking client instruction from next month and close at the end of the year – as a direct result of the legal aid funding reductions.

Since the miner’s strike, joint head of chambers Mansfield has made a lucrative living taking on human rights cases and challenges to the establishment. So much so that in legal circles he earned the nickname Mr Moneybags, with earnings apparently exceeding £700,000 per year.

A good example of how Mansfield earned this title, at the expense of taxpayers, is retailed in a Daily Mail piece from 2007. It recalls how even as far back as 1998, Mansfield represented a client in a criminal appeal before the House of Lords. In return for 43 hours work he submitted a legal aid bill of £22,300, or more than £500 per hour. Apparently after the Lord Chancellor criticised the fee, Mansfield very generously knocked £10,000 off the bill and only took £12,300 from the public purse.

There is no doubt that Mansfield has, during his career, taken on deserving cases in need of justice. But the issue is the manner of his treatment of the public purse. The Telegraph piece sets out what steps Mansfield and other Tooks’ barristers are being forced to take in order to start a new chambers and keep working after Tooks has gone:

Mr Mansfield said he plans to form his own, low-cost chambers “within the near future”.

Fifteen barristers from Tooks are expected to join the new set, to be called Mansfield Chambers, which will keep overheads low by employing fewer clerks, sharing desks in cheaper offices and using free computer software.

Only now, with limits put in place on the previously never ending reservoir of public money wrested from us through taxation, are some of these well-heeled legal eagles starting to be mindful of the costs they incur that they have long relied upon us to fund.

Where was this focus on costs previously? The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that many solicitors and barristers are now reaping what they have long sown.

Had they charged reasonable fees and sought to be responsible in their use of other people’s money, perhaps the legal aid cutbacks would not have needed to be so drastic – and most importantly, more innocent people in need of help to fund worthy cases would not be squeezed out and left at the mercy of better resourced parties.

Perhaps this is something the BBC and other agenda based media would do well to consider when attacking the government.

Support for the European Union’s climate and energy policy eroded further Friday as the Czech Republic became the latest member to denounce subsidies for clean but costly renewable energy and pledged to double down on its use of fossil fuels.

It followed Poland’s declaration that it would use its abundant domestic coal supplies for power generation rather than invest in costly renewable energy facilities. Spain abolished subsidies for photovoltaic power generation in July and the U.K.’s power markets regulator last month froze solar power subsidies for the rest of the year.

If renewables gave value for money and provided a reliable source of energy, this would not be happening. But the reality is these subsidy sinkholes are good for nothing but making landowners and renewables companies a huge amount of money, robbed from taxpayers and ever rising costs passed on to energy customers. But as Carney’s piece explains, there are other consequences to this ludicrous largesse:

The Czech Republic has seen a surge in renewable power production over the last four years due to rich cash payouts for investors in the sector. Since then public outrage over fast-rising power prices has forced politicians to put the brakes on subsidies. The payouts have been a drag on the economy, creating uncertainty on energy markets and preventing utilities from investing.

So Germany continues to build more coal fired power stations, the Czech Republic and Poland are reverting back to coal and economic reality bites in Spain. Yet the UK has in Ed Davey a minister for Energy and Climate Change who bitterly opposed the UK’s freeze in power subsidies and is demanding we go further down the road to the renewables abyss by ramping up the amount of underperforming wind turbines for the sake of ideology.

Ed Davey is doing this irrespective of the possible harm to our energy security, the ever rising cost to taxpayers and consumers, and the fact our European neighbours are calling time on a shocking financial waste that has delivered nothing close to what was promised in return. The EU is hamstrung, member states are rushing back for reliable and affordable energy sources, evidence that reversing the CO2 madness on energy can be done.

Yet despite this the British are being dragged into penury by a delusional idiot who is happy to squander other people’s money to satisfy his vanity and desperation to be seen as virtuous. And while Davey picks our pockets to push his policy agenda and describes realist opponents in the Conservative Party as its stone age wing, without any sense of irony his Lib Dem socialist mate Vince Cable has the nerve to describe the Tories as the nasty party. Satire is truly dead.

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There seems to be no limit to Ed Davey’s capacity to press ahead ever more aggressively with the discredited, grossly expensive, unreliable and unpopular proliferation of wind turbines. In the Telegraph we find coverage of a speech by Davey and some of his pre-speech comments.

They confirm him to be dangerously detached from reality, in possession of a disturbing quasi-religious obsession with wind power and impervious to all evidence that demonstrates his beloved wind turbines are far from value for money and simply do not serve the needs of the population. His response to evidence of the shortcomings and inefficiency of wind power is tunnel-visioned inflexibility, and a propensity to lash out at those who highlight them. It is like witnessing a recalcitrant child running amok in a man’s body.

Davey’s sole reaction is to revert to ad hominem attacks, which he has done with an assault on Owen Paterson, who commissioned a report on the impact of wind farms on the countryside. Given Davey’s dogged devotion to advocating and encouraging the proliferation of yet more of these wasteful, subsidy-hungry machines, irony doesn’t come close to defining Davey’s whinge that Paterson’s report would be ‘partial’. The rationale for this, the Telegraph explains, is that Davey doesn’t believe the report would ‘fit with Lib Dem ideology on wind farms’.

Never mind whether the report is accurate, or exposes yet more shortcomings and negatives of wind turbines, the Lib Dems have a worldview – and regardless how flawed or wrongheaded it is we have to suffer the consequences. Consider these comments attributed to Davey:

Take the battles I fight over wind power.

Owen Paterson would cull wind turbines faster than he can cull badgers.

But we have prevented the stone age wing of the Conservative Party from destroying our leading renewables industry.

So it’s not about reliable ‘clean’ energy or climate change – the alarmist predictions about which are already being shown up as greatly exaggerated computer model hype. It’s not about providing the energy people need in an affordable way. It’s about partisan party politics and propping up an industry at vast public expense. An industry that creates great wealth for landowners and renewables companies and ensures they get their lavish pay offs from our tax pounds and energy bill payments, regardless of how poorly the turbines perform or how little energy they actually produce.

The ‘stone age’ wing of the Conservative Party that objects to such outrageous waste and excessive cost, has been held off by the ‘recidivist thievery’ wing of the Liberal Democrats that views our money as their personal slush fund.

Those people who thought Chris Huhne was bad and breathed a sigh of relief when he resigned ahead of the courtroom exposure of his lies and contempt for the public, hadn’t bargained on the Lib Dems coughing up something even worse from their reservoir of objectionable and dangerously delusional ideologues. But that’s exactly what they’ve done with Ed Davey.

Davey is dangerous and he has to go. But neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg will act to remove him, as they share his belief system. So the rest of us will continue to pay the price, in more ways than one.

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And so, after publishing a festering pile of distorted and deliberately misleading rubbish that deceives people about the power and influence Norway enjoys by being outside of the EU, but having access to the single market (read how the journalist who did the piece was forced to concede his distortions by The Boiling Frog), the public suffers some more as the BBC rides again … this time with another festering pile of distorted and deliberately misleading rubbish that deliberately conceals the root cause of the suffering being experienced by households across the UK that cannot afford to heat their homes.

This is exactly what was supposed to happen. The policy imposed on the UK by the EU is designed to reduce energy demand by driving up prices and limiting supply. It is the same with forcing down demand for water by driving up prices and preventing an increase in supply. ‘They’ have decided energy use is driving the planet to global warming thermogeddon so something must be done. So we have to suffer the consequences.

‘They’ are the environmentalist and sustainability NGOs at work, sitting by invitation at the EU top table as the supposed citizen body representatives. Given equal weight to that carried by the national representatives they sit alongside, they are unelected, unaccountable and lavishly funded by the political class to lobby and inform or even direct the policies the political class impose upon us.

This is what passes for democracy in the EU. Self professed ‘experts’ in the field of ‘sustainability’, reversing the positive progress mankind has made over decades to provide affordable energy to heat and light homes in even the poorest households in our society, because they believe the source of that energy is dirty and harmful to the planet and they demand we use less energy in order to accommodate the useless renewable solutions also forced on us as a partial replacement at enormous cost.

These are people who have been given huge power to determine how we should live our lives, without the inconvenience of having to seek our approval via the ballot box for their agenda and the implementation of their deluded and damaging worldview.

So it is that while:

Sixty-seven percent of people said they would support more coal, oil and gas stations being built in the UK if it brought energy prices down.

the prospect of it happening does not exist. We are in thrall to the eco warriors who would have us living our lives in a de-industrialised society akin to the world portrayed on the US TV drama ‘Revolution’. But where is the BBC’s analysis about why this is happening?

Heaven forbid that the environmentalists’ biggest and loudest cheerleader, the BBC, should shine a light on how we have been brought here and where we are being taken. Such coverage is not permitted in the echo chamber.

Heaven forbid we should be told how we are governed, who makes these policies, why they make them and that without a fundamental change to our ‘democratic’ structures that we cannot get rid of them.

UPDATE: The BBC has updated its story and the headline, in a typically slippery way. Instead of focusing on 25% of the population ‘enduring cold homes’, which is a hard hitting fact based upon the survey results, they have changed headline to ‘Heating bills concern 38% of population’, which plays down the consequences of the legislation’s impact.

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In 2010, a man by the name of Kieran Doherty was found shot dead in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, naked and bound and dumped by a roadside. It was a heinous crime.

After following the process that exists in such circumstances, Doherty’s mother and grandmother have now been awarded an undisclosed sum by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Appeals Panel, described by Doherty’s uncle as a ‘substantial’ amount.

It all sounds quite reasonable, until you realise that Doherty was a member of the terrorist Real IRA and the killing was carried out by his own terrorists-in-arms. He was also a convict who had served time in prison.

So what we have is a man who opposes Northern Ireland being part of the UK, who resents the British and views them as an occupying force and therefore joins a terrorist organisation to take up arms in support of Irish unification, because at this time the majority of people in the country want to remain part of the United Kingdom. He falls foul of his fellow men of violence and is ‘executed’.

Not only has the British taxpayer funded the murder investigation by the PSNI and an additional investigation and report into unfounded allegations of MI5 collusion in the killing, but we are now also having our pockets picked pay the family of this worthless terrorist scumbag compensation for his murder – which was brought about because of his fetish for the bomb and bullet and his desire for violence over democracy.

Our money should not be squandered in this way. Doherty bit off more than he could chew and deserved to pay the price. We should be pleased there is one less gun toting bomber to contend with in Northern Ireland, not handing out compensation for his killing. His family almost certainly knew of his involvement in the Real IRA, yet they will now benefit financially from the consequences of that membership at our expense?

Their compensation claim was an insult and should have been thrown straight into the nearest bin. Clearly it is we taxpayers who really end up paying the price, of the stupidity of officials who fall over themselves to make nice with terrorists and their families by wasting our money to reward their criminality and hatred of this country, and treating us as a bottomless pit to do it.

When the talking heads take to the press and airwaves to witter on about tax ‘fairness’ and the need of taxpayers and businesses to pay their ‘fair share’ the comments and the kneejerk reactions to them are enough to make one lose the will to live.

For while the governmental entities, local and national, are striving to relieve us of ever greater sums of our money, too few people stand up to demand these entities explain why they need so much of it and to account for its use. The media never asks. There is no accountability. When the Americans waged a war of independence from the British one of their demands was ‘no taxation without representation’. Today in the UK we have plenty of taxation, but the only representation we see is the political class representing its own agendas at our expense.

Whenever governmental entities cite the consequences of a lower tax take from us, do you notice how they always provide examples of the effects of lower spending on essential services and describe any inability to confiscate from us whatever they want as being a ‘cost’ to the council or government? The notion of living within their means is alien to them. There’s always someone else’s bank account to raid to make up the difference. Notice also how they never provide examples where essential services are unaffected, but rather the council or government’s discretionary (non essential) spending is reduced, so their pet projects and bribes are scaled back instead instead of core services. You see, their priorities are always put before our priorities.

If we refuse to feed the parasitic beast then it will dole out punishment by protecting spending on what it wants to focus on, while reducing spending on what it has to focus on. Rather than enforce the law when it comes to taxation and illegally set fines, local authorities are not even behaving as if they are above the law – they are behaving as if they are the law. This is a matter of great concern that will be revisited here soon.

But, focusing on local government for now, we must not – like the waste of time press – ignore how council income has increased substantially through the ever growing list of charges and fees which residents have to pay for services that we already pay taxes to provide. Councils not only get their central government grant and collect council tax from residents, they also make a fortune in charges that far exceed the cost of administration they were supposedly designed to cover. The total amount that councils take from residents over the course of a year far exceeds the council tax demand we receive each year. Ask your local paper where they’ve written on that subject.

Despite all this, just over one week ago, the Local Government Association published a briefing note in which it suggested a number of amendments, one of which demanded the government in Westminster scrap its plans to embed council tax referendums in the Local Audit and Accountability Bill:

Not only is local government increasingly abusing its ability to snatch money from us at every turn (as we saw earlier this week in Barnet and is something that is happening up and down the country) its mouthpiece representative body (guess how that is funded) is demanding that we residents should not be asked for our consent via local referendum for increases above a very small percentage.

Brighton & Hove City Council has already declared its refusal to hold a referendum on any proposed council tax increase. The leader of the Green Party minority administration in Brighton, Cllr Jason Kitcat, really took the biscuit when he told the local press:

The referendum rule is mad. It’s not really workable and would cost about £300,000 to run.

There you have it. A sitting councillor who no doubt prattles on about ‘democracy’ and the ‘wishes of the people’ when trying to get elected, declaring that having to seek our democratic consent for a raid on our personal wealth, is unworkable. In other words, the council should be allowed to demand what it likes and to hell with what residents think.

No doubt Cllr Kitcat subscribes to the view of elected politicians and council officials throughout the country (which Richard articulated so effectively in a post on EU Referendum) that revenue-providers (aka citizens) are confined to expressing their wishes on council tax via approved channels – such as voting – which can be safely ignored, or funnelled into areas where the message can be discounted. Find one party political manifesto for borough or county council elections that has not been torn up mid-term so a council can do something different.

Of course, forcing residents to declare their revenue raising wishes by voting in council elections also has the happy coincidence of giving the impression these parasitic charlatans have legitimacy for their subsequent actions, which is almost impossible for voters to control once those fat arses settle on the comfy chairs in the council chamber.

Understand this. Unless you withdraw your consent and stand up to press for change, you are nothing more than a cash cow who risks being turned into a debt slave. Your rights are ignored by your public servants, you are treated with contempt by them and even the guardians of the law will not uphold the law to protect you from illegal actions that echo the outrageous, lawless and intimidatory behaviours of feudal lords, robber barons and corrupt clergy in centuries long since passed.

Have you had enough yet?

Update: Richard beat me to the punch, and with far more eloquence expands on how councils whine about having to place statutory notices in the local papers, yet won’t yield an inch when it comes to spending a small fortune producing, printing and distributing their propaganda sheets – which always give a self congratulatory take on the news they want to share.

Try and find a single story in those reams of dead trees about why councils issue liability orders to residents that are way above the cost of the administration in producing them, which is legally all they are allowed to recoup. Find one story about how the bailiffs they contract to enforce their council tax or parking fines break the law by charging illegal fees and claiming for visits that never happened. Find one explanation about why we pay an ever rising policing precept to the county council, yet the borough council uses money for local services to fund restricted-power PCSOs to make up for a shortage of real police on our streets. It’s happening everywhere, and no one is holding these slimeballs to account.

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The Leader of Barnet Council, Richard Cornelius, is another example of a politician who resorts to weasel words and refuses to acknowledge or accept when his council has exceeded its authority and broken the law.

Speaking after Barnet Council was found to have illegally driven up the charges for controlled parking zones in the borough in order to raise revenue, rather than simply maintain the scheme, Cllr Cornelius tried to play down the seriousness of the issue by saying:

It is fairly clear that the council raised the price of parking permits, after five years of a price freeze, too abruptly and rather charmlessly. I will make sure that doesn’t happen again.

With the council considering spending more taxpayers’ money to pursue an appeal, Cllr Cornelius then attempted to play the ‘everyone else is doing it’ card:

Both our pricing and spending are very much in line with other London boroughs.

That of course doesn’t make it right. Cornelius is whining like a spoiled child at the unfairness of being pulled up for his council’s illegal behaviour.

This matter is yet another case of councils doing what they think they can get away with. It is also a splendid example of the importance of residents taking an interest in what goes on in Town Halls and challenging councils who think they can bully people into compliance through threats and using taxpayers’ money to fund legal action.

The lesson from residents is not only that you can take on local authorities when they are in the wrong and win, but that we all have a duty to do so. The forget they are supposed to be our servants and we need to correct the unacceptable imbalance in the relationship.

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From time to time the blogosphere has the ability to restore one’s faith in the capacity of social media to provide contributions of immense value. One such contribution can be found on Cranmer’s website today, written by Rev’d Dr Peter Mullen.

It is a piece that speaks truth to sentimental delusion.

This blog rarely ventures onto the subject of the NHS. My personal experience of the health service’s impacts on my family and friends is far more negative than positive and as Rev Mullen points out in his piece, the NHS has the same status in Britain as that of a cow among Hindu devotees.

The NHS cannot be criticised in any way without a legion of those devotees hurling bile filled invective at the person offering the criticism. Never mind that among other failings, the poor and declining standard of care in the NHS resulted in the death of my mother, came within a whisker of ending the life of my wife moments after she gave birth to our precious son, and made the final days of her step-father’s life undignified and needlessly painful.

I have done battle with the Nursing Directors, Consultants and Managers, each of whom attempted to defend clear failings to the point of saying black was white, all because their primary concern was worry about a possible legal case for compensation, rather than a desire to correct the problems at source. As I found, when all else fails and their argument has been comprehensively destroyed, the next things to be destroyed are the incriminating medical notes and ability to recall conversations held in front of witnesses. All that could remain is blind faith in the NHS, which is why Rev’d Mullen’s description of the service as the National Health Church is so apt.

The NHS is not fit for purpose. It is a bureaucratic behemoth, violently resistant to change, and imbued with and unwarranted self belief that is fuelled by those cheerleaders inside and outside it – many of whom have political motives for supporting what has been little more than a charnel house for tens of thousands of people in recent years, whose conditions would not and should not have resulted in death or long term suffering.

The people and businesses of this country are forking over £95.6 billion pounds of our money this year to fund the NHS in England – an organisation that has an unjustified sense of entitlement and expectation. Entitlement to operate in its own interests rather than that of patients and expectation that people should not criticise it, because it comprises, as Rev’d Mullen so incisively observes, those who are described as ‘angels…wonderful…caring…tireless…salt of the earth’.

There are still NHS staff who don’t feel the job of providing care and comfort and affording dignity to patients is beneath them. There are still doctors and consultants who recognise their job role is trying to heal patients by treating them for their ailments, rather than constructing departmental fiefdoms and playing politics. There are even managers who add value to the NHS by trying to administer the hospital effectively so patients get the care they need and the taxpayer gets value for money. But there are too few of each of them in the ‘modern NHS’.

There are better options for the use of our money to achieve the better medical outcomes. But all the while the political class, media and National Health Church faithful continue to prop up this broken socialised construct, we will all be stuck with it or be forced to pay more of our money to go private in order to get the standards of care and treatment the NHS is supposed to provide but all too often fails to deliver – with far too many casualties paying the ultimate price in this pseudo-religious war.

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In the Telegraph today is a piece about the ‘true cost of Britain’s wind farm industry’ which underlines the extent of direct (let alone the indirect) consumer-funded subsidy deployed to propping up one of the most unreliable and inefficient forms of energy generation available.

The piece opens:

A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year. They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.

The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for the wind industry, which claims it is an economically dynamic sector that creates jobs. It was described by critics as proof the sector was not economically viable, with one calling it evidence of “soft jobs” that depended on the taxpayer.

It’s an interesting take, to focus on the extent of subsidy paid to wind farms against the number of wind farm jobs that exist. But that doesn’t take into other subsidy that pours into the industry from other taxpayer funded sources. Also it encompass jobs that were focussed on building and installing the subsidy farms in the first place, so the piece undermines itself. When that happens it doesn’t do any favours to those of us opposed to the government’s insane and utterly disastrous reliance on wind farms for baseload power, for such pieces leave us open to attack for inaccuracy.

What the piece should do is remind people that creating jobs which are reliant on public subsidy does nothing to boost the productive sector of the economy. It is simply another government mandated burden on the consumer/taxpayer. That is because the roles that have been created at these subsidy farms would not have been without legislation designed to skew the energy market to underpin uneconomic wind farm development, and without rules put in place to confiscate extra money from us to service their upkeep we would not be paying so much for our energy. The energy market would not have opted for wind if left without interference to develop the most cost effective and reliable energy solutions that would be delivered at less cost to the companies and their customers.

But while we are on the subject, let’s take a quick look at the contribution being made to our power needs by all those grotesquely expensive wind turbines pitting the countryside up and down our nation, within the last hour…

1.4% is a disgraceful return for the huge sums of money that have been taken from us to service the government’s unjustified and pressure group driven decarbonisation agenda. Hanging would be too good for these people as punishment for the wholesale theft we have suffered at their hands and their justification for it on the strength of an unproven hypothesis.

They should count themselves fortunate that most people have, as intended, been distracted from real issues affecting all our lives by mind numbing TV programmes and glitzy trivia.